Thursday, 17 March 2016

REVIEW - AAAAAAAAH! (STEVE ORAM)

Oh, great! Just what we need! Another education in self-reflection, another social satire lesson, another meta mindfuck designed not to enhance the audience's intelligence and perceptiveness, but to prove just how intelligent and perceptive the filmmakers are. "Look! We acknowledge the baselessness, the reductiveness, the shallowness of our society! And now we're making fun of it, of ourselves! How innovative! How alternative!" Dear white people, heterosexual people, 30-50-year-old people, middle-class people, cisgender people... dear the filmmakers of Aaaaaaaah!: it's all very well that you appreciate the depth of your own cultural stagnation, but no amount of self-awareness, no level of commentary, no matter how quirky, is actually going to make a difference toward changing it. I don't care for your half-cooked concepts - they're largely senseless, and their effect entirely wears off 10 minutes in. I don't care for your envelope-pushing - it's all been done before, and the bizarre mix of prudishness and prurience only exposes your own sensitivities as being as integral to the society you mock as all of those elements at which you sneer. I don't care for your low-budget stylings - I know they're affectations, not necessities, and you don't present them with any particular insight into their application, thus rendering their artistic value void. I don't care for how much you purport to care. Your film is of negligible worth as a reflection upon anyone but yourselves, and the quasi-cool irony in this is much too hackneyed to harbour any genuine intellectual import. I don't care for your film. One less chicken joke and you'd have lost this last half star.